The Portable Promised Land Read online

  A week before my first visit to the restaurant I began seeing the main hostess, Charisma Donovan. It’s true. Last summer I had the privilege of dating that young goddess for ten days. Every night we sat out on the balcony of the Soho duplex her father paid for and got high and threw grapes at cars passing by on the street below and stayed up til the sun came up talking about my future as a rap star and hers in Hollywood. She was all about becoming an actress. That’s why she moved to the city right after prep school and worked at Jamais. She said hostessing there was “like an audition for being famous every single night.”

  She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever been with and I wanted to be with her forever, that is, until that first night at Jamais. That’s when I began to see that Charisma had a secret. Or really, that a secret had her.

  I was at the studio with Peter Picasso and the Skinny Pimps trying yet again to convince them to let me rhyme on their record and getting absolutely no love. Around midnight Charisma called on the cell and said a table was opening up around 3:45 and maybe, she said seductively, I could walk her home at six. I wanted to say no. A whole week on Charisma’s schedule had left me kinda sleepless and I wanted to get some rest before I turned into a zombie, but a voice inside me said, Who are you to say no to Charisma Donovan?

  The spot was way over in the West Village on Abaddon Place, a street the cab driver had never even heard of. I thought the guy was a moron, but on his way to the West Village he stopped and asked four other cabbies and none of them had ever heard of Abaddon Place, either. Do you know how hard it is to find a street in Manhattan that five cabbies have never heard of ? He turned off the meter and we drove around for a while and finally found it by accident, right by the West Side Highway. It was the worst block in the world for a restaurant. It was this small cobblestone block and there was like no parking and everything else on the block was a brownstone, so there was no reason to go to that block except to go home or to Jamais. But even from the cab you could see that the place was on fire.

  It was a few minutes past four when I got there, but the sidewalk in front of the place was filled with perfectly coiffed women in shoes that left their feet naked and men slouching deeply or puffing out their chests lionly. They were smoking, celling, dancing, gesturing theatrically so you could make out the general outline of every conversation, and drinking from these fantastic glasses with scarlet capital Js engraved on them. They were that overnight New York crew, all ecstatically blasé. You know, overstating their understatement in that New York way. The front doors of Jamais were about thirty feet tall, these big reddish-brown wooden things that looked as if they’d been carved from redwood trees. As I waded through the sidewalk throng into the dimly lit front, Mark was spinning Curtis Mayfield’s “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go.” After a moment he mixed into Biggie Smalls’s “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You),” and then spun Marvin Gaye’s “If I Should Die Tonight,” and just as I thought, three tragically dead artists in a row, this girl grabbed my shoulder, smiled at me with her eyes, and started dancing with me. It was that seventeen-year-old movie actress Serenity Somethingorother. You know, the one with so many freckles there’s more freckled than nonfreckled space on her face. I started dancing with her and there we were, me and little Miss Somethingorother, swallowed up inside this sidewalk throng that was swallowed up inside this syrupy smooth slow groove.

  When Mark mixed into Otis Redding’s “Sittin On the Dock of the Bay,” hmm, plane-crash victim, Serenity gave me a peck on the cheek and bounced away like a rabbit. I went back to squeezing through the throng. As soon as I could see people sitting, I could see the place was filled with stars. Gucciana, that Italian model with the horselike nose, Jenny Welch, the nail-polish-color architect, the Knicks’s mountainous center Chauncey “Cloud-Kisser” McClanahan, Miss Orgazama, the six-foot-three drag queen with double-E tits, Sugar Dice Lucid, the head of Zeitgeist Jockey Records, MC Big Bank, the rapper slash realestate mogul, the Right Revren Daddy Love, Dr. Noble Truette, the chief planner and architect of Soul City, Harlem drug-lord Cheesey Mack sitting with porn-star Cherry Virtuosity, and in the back corner Alpacino Johnson, the guy known for having the world’s biggest penis, and his wife, Gigi Lolapolangianzamo. The whole rest of the place was crammed with people who were beautiful, styled, and tattooed enough to qualify for that particularly New York class of people who aren’t famous only because the right camera hasn’t been pointed at them yet. They’re what my man Cadillac Jackson calls Tweeners— they’re in between fame and anonymity.

  Then I saw Charisma. She had her hair teased out in waves like Farrah Fawcett circa “Charlie’s Angels” and these scarlet-tinted aviator sunglasses, this T-shirt from the Jackson Five cartoon show with sparkles on the sleeves, and these mouth-wateringly-tight-fitting black velvet bell-bottoms. The punchline for her whole 70s homage thing was that Charisma was born in 1983. She walked up and gave me a brief, but very tight hug. She slid one hand around to the back of my waist and pushed my crotch into hers and squoze her breasts into my chest and scratched the back of my neck with her nails and purred into my ear, “Sooo glad you’re here.” It all lasted about three seconds, but it was the best hug I’ve ever had.

  She couldn’t really talk because she was busy, so she led me to a table by squishing past a bunch of people dancing to John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” publicly assassinated, which, under Mark’s hands, somehow rocked. I sat and opened the menu.

  APPETIZERS

  Crispy Tarantula Legs

  with chipotle aioli

  Sea-Lion Carpaccio

  on a bed of arugula with black truffle oil

  Galapagos-Turtle Chowder

  Platypus-Cheek Napoleon

  alternating layers of sautéed platypus cheeks, roasted beets, chèvre, and watercress between thin slices of crunchy polenta

  Grilled Penguin Feet

  with plum-mango chutney

  ENTRÉES

  Roasted Ostrich Breast

  with roasted root vegetables and sautéed fiddleheads

  Scrambled Peacock Eggs

  with wild-boar bacon and potato hash

  Pan-Fried Barracuda

  with saffron sea urchin and asparagus risotto

  Rhinoceros Testes

  stuffed with Saskatchewan morels and wild rice

  with braised fennel in a calvados emulsion

  Kangaroo-Tail Gumbo

  with dingo sausage, koala, flageolets, and dried eucalyptus leaves

  Lingonberry Caribou Filet

  lightly seared with sugar snap peas and celery root puree

  Seaweed Tagliatelle with Baby Costa Rican Starfish

  with shallots and pine nuts in a belvedere cream sauce

  YOUR JUST DESSERTS

  Sliced Blood Oranges

  in a scarlet chocolate sauce

  Nether Bean Crème Brûlée

  sprinkled with chocolate brimstone

  Devil’s Temptation

  chocolate devastation, chocolate dementia,

  and chocolate demise in a bottomless pit

  Hellaciously Sinful Death by Chocolate

  the end of you

  I could’ve read a book in the time I spent waiting for a server. I thought of calling Charisma but she looked busy so I just chilled. After a while my eye landed on this Black guy a few feet from my table with the most tremendous Afro I’ve ever seen — I mean this thing stretched wider than his shoulders and must’ve weighed more than his head. He’d clearly spent the same kindof time growing and maintaining it that people put into gardens. He was on a table doing the bump with some girl on roller skates and having a really good time. Then, abruptly, he jumped off his table, made a beeline to my table, and slapped on a look of supreme annoyance.

  “You want?” he said flatly.

  This was my waiter?

  “You eating or what, yo?” His tone was like, You’re wasting my time, yo. His Afro cast a shadow over my entire table.
/>   I said, “The, uh, turtle chowder and the ostrich....”

  But before I’d even completed my sentence he said, “Uhhuh,” and rushed off in the opposite direction of the kitchen. Feeling certain I wouldn’t see food, drink, bread, or water any time soon I got up and went to the DJ booth.

  Mark is this DJ slash model kid who grew up rich and then made his own fortune spinning records, but if you just saw him walking down the street you’d never know he was a New York celebutante because he looks like some slouchy Jewish kid with a hiphop fetish. I love Mark because he’s jaded on this depth that only lifelong New Yorkers can achieve, yet he still has this really innocent quality about him and those two things kindof coalesce to make him, like, the king of the ecstatically blasé.

  Mark can spin any record at any time and make you lose your mind. Like right then, as I was walking over to the booth, he went from Bob Marley’s “Exodus,” he died of cancer, into Big Pun’s “It’s So Hard,” heart attack, into “Boyz-N-Tha Hood” by Eazy-E, AIDS. Then he slid a needle onto Tupac’s “California Love” and sent the crowd into hysterics.

  “Whassup, man?” he said to me, pulling off his headphones, barely opening his mouth to make the words. As king of the ecstatically blasé, Mark talks kinda slowly and without moving his mouth much and not moving his tongue at all and, somehow, half the sound of whatever he’s saying comes out of his nose.

  I said, “Yo, is this some special theme you’re spinning tonight?”

  “What duh ya mean?”

  “All these dead people.”

  “I duh know,” he said. “The owner is here and he told me these are duh records he wanted to hear tonight.”

  “Who’s the owner?”

  “I’ll point him out to you when he comes out the kitchen.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The Tupac record was ending and he had to get back to spinning so I walked back to my table. But I couldn’t help but think, Who is this owner?, and instead of going back to my table I kinda took advantage of the chaos in the place and slipped into the kitchen, pretending to be a server. It was easy. They didn’t have a uniform and they never looked like they were working. There wasn’t much going on in the kitchen except for this giant cage in the far corner that held a few ostriches. All the cooks were just standing around like it was closing time, laughing like crazy at every word of this really short and totally sweet-looking guy in a badass black suit with a shiny silk scarlet shirt and matching tie who was a dead ringer for George Burns. The glasses, the cigar, the wrinkled skin, the complete lack of lips: they were like twins. I figured he had to be the owner because all the cooks were just standing there listening to him tell a joke.

  “So Mike and Reverend Ray are best friends,” he said in this croaky voice, “and they make a pact that if one of them ever dies then he’ll make every effort to get in contact with the other from beyond the grave. One day Reverend Ray is in the church giving one of the altar boys a blow job when the kid’s father walks in and blows him away. A few months later Mike’s phone rings. It’s Reverend Ray. Mike freaks out. ‘Oh my God, it’s you! How are you? What’s your day like? What’s going on?’

  “The Reverend says, ‘I’m good, man. Actually, I’m great. My day is like this: I wake up, have a nice meal, fuck, take a nap, have a meal, fuck again, take a nap, have a meal, and fuck again.’ Mike says, ‘Oh my God! I had no idea Heaven was so great!’” The old man took a drag from his cigar. “And the Reverend says, ‘Fuck Heaven! I’m a buffalo in Wyoming!’”

  When I got back to my table there was hot food and a drink with limes in it. Nothing I’d ordered and nothing I recognized.

  “That’s good stuff,” the woman at the table beside me said to her friend. “I had it last week.”

  I turned to her. “Could you tell me what it is?”

  “You’ve got the tarantula legs and the rhino testes.”

  I had a vision of a rhino in the Serengeti, his balls bouncing as he ran. A hairy, black tarantula creeping toward me. How had they removed these big balls? Did they capture the killer spider or was he farm-raised? I never heard chickens clucking when I dug into a bucket of Kentucky Fried, never worried about whether my burger had been free-range. Why was I suddenly getting a conscience? “Oh, don’t be a wuss,” the woman next to me said. “All the food here is wonderful. It’s epiphanal. Trust me.”

  I looked at the tarantula legs. There were ten, all but two of them longer than my own fingers and thinner, arranged on the plate with a sinister curve to them. I almost hoped they would come to life and slither away so I could avoid eating them. I was a small child again, seated in front of a now-cold plate of lima beans or spinach or yams, my face twisting, my stomach churning, my brothers long gone from the table, my mother yelling, “Commence to eat!” The memory faded. The tarantula legs had not crawled off. I steadied myself. I picked one up and held it gingerly, pursing my lips, considering it from all sides, feeling a nervous shiver wash over me. The woman beside me giggled derisively. She made me feel like a pussy. Was it worse to be bullied by a stranger or by your food? I squinted, steeled myself, and nibbled at the leg’s top bit.

  It was a moment before my taste buds rendered judgment. The first impression was... not bad. Not bad at all. Quite good, actually. I took a heartier bite and immediately wanted another. Oh, I could eat a truckload of these. They’re sublime! “See,” the woman beside me crowed.

  I regarded the two monstrous rhino balls with a sortof gastronomical arrogance. Those balls were a mountain I knew I could climb. I sliced off a piece, swashed it in the sauce, and popped it in my mouth. God, was it good! My taste buds were singing of astounding sensations. I dug in, racing food to my mouth, savoring each bit, hoping it would never end. And as the legs and the balls and the drink and the baby string beans eased into my stomach I began to feel really happy and really free and I looked around and wanted to tell every single person in the room how beautiful they were and I felt a clarity I’d never before known, that anything in life was within reach and I really could become a rapper if I just trusted myself enough to let go and Charisma and I should just go and get married and this fork was so well designed and I should go visit my grandmother soon. I began to feel really, really good about my life. I turned to the woman beside me, put both hands on her, looked directly into her eyes, and said, “You are so beautiful. I love you.” She laughed and said, “You too, sweetie.”

  When the Afro-dude reappeared I thought, I haven’t seen you in about an hour. You’re easily the worst server I’ve ever had in my entire life. But I didn’t care.

  “So how was everything?” he said. He seemed nice. Everyone in the place did.

  “It was... amazing,” I said and smiled at him.

  He laughed. “That’s good, that’s good. So, have you ever eaten with us here before?”

  “No, no.”

  “At Jamais we have our own way of billing,” he said. “There aren’t any prices on the menu because we trust you. You know what you had to eat, you know how much you enjoyed your food. We leave the bill up to you. Pay whatever you think is appropriate.” He smiled. “And we only take cash.”

  He handed me a blank bill and walked away. This, I believe, was an African tradition. The amount you pay is a reflection of you. Pay too little and you appear cheap. Pay too much and it seems you don’t know what your meal was worth. It showed an inherent respect for the customer and people always respond well to being respected. But really it played to that post-epiphanal swoon. It was like asking an addict to pay for his medicine as he floated through a nice high. I left a stack of cash.

  Just before six Charisma told me she was ready to go. I ran to the bathroom and found this waitress crying really hard. (The bathroom, of course, was coed.) Normally I would’ve let her be, but she was all alone and I was still feeling the glow of Everything is beautiful, so I sat beside her and rubbed her back.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “My life is ruined,” she
choked out.

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t come here to become a waitress. I’m an actress!”

  “A lot of actresses are waiting tables.”

  “You don’t understand. This place is a big fucking cage! No one’s ever leaving. We’re stuck here. He’ll just have us work here for years and then he’ll kick us out and we’ll have nothing to show for years of waiting and hoping and praying. Oh, why am I telling you?”

  But suddenly I understood everything. Maybe something in the food helped me see why the place was so hard to find, why it was so trendy, why they were able to get zoning in the middle of a residential block, why the food was so weird, why it tasted so good. I remembered back to tenth grade that jamais is French for never, as in never come or never go. I ran out of the bathroom, grabbed Charisma by the arm, and told her she had to run. She thought it was a game. We ran out of there, ran a few blocks in the dim-orange morning sun, past she-males and garbagemen, and when I felt far enough away I pushed her against a wall and kissed her and it seemed all passionate so she made this oh-take-me-you-wild-boy! noise but I kissed her with no romantic intent at all. I wanted to know her breath. It had this crisp, almost fried edge to it, like the way breath tastes just after a drag on a cigarette. But Charisma didn’t smoke. Somehow I just knew what it meant. She’d sold her soul.

  I pulled back and looked at Charisma. She was so beautiful. She was so fucked. Why had he done this to her, to all of them? Why build an army of soulless dreamers, feeding their dreams while clipping their wings? I didn’t know what to say to Charisma, but I had to find that owner. I turned to run back to Jamais, but when I turned, he was there, sucking a cigar, leaning against the wall. The shock stopped my heart.